fool4jesus

You can. But it will take a lot of work. I would suggest not paying that much attention to reading and (especially) writing. Rather, focus on listening and speaking. Listening is what I’ve always found the hardest thing – people never say what you think they will say! You will pick up reading on your own just from your books and what Spanish you probably already know from where you live.

So, use a lot of audio/video materials. Rather than listing them out here, I would like to point you to my Amazon.com guide to learning Spanish on your own:

http://tinyurl.com/mrjfm

Any more questions, feel free to email me at gbisaga at yahoo dot com (that’s gbisaga arroba yahoo punto com in Spanish).

I also want to do learn to tell stories in everyday life. My problem is not revealing the “punchline” right up front so much as that I can never make connections. It seems like part of being an everyday storyteller is to connect your story with the conversation. Such-and-such happens, and you say “That reminds me of the time when …” I end up listening to the comments go by and only later do I think of a personal experience that would have made a good story at the time.

In addition, I specifically want to think of stories with a point I want to make related to what’s happening. Say I’m speaking in public, and somebody steps up to the mic and asks me a question. I respond “Let me answer by telling you a story…” Or something happens, and I want to make a point (about chastity, honesty, etc.) to one of my kids. “That’s funny. It reminds me of the time when …”

I guess I could practice paying attention to what’s going on around me and trying to think of a point and a story related to it. It seems impossible to me at this point, however. Has anybody gone through a process like this and have tips on exercises to do?

We went to China to adopt our daughter. It is a wonderful place, although so much different from the US. There, people power is cheap and mechanical power is expensive – just the opposite of here. One of the most amazing sights was seeing a crew tearing down a building in Beijing. In the US, they’d send a couple of guys with a wrecking ball, jack hammers, and a dump truck. There, there was a crowd of men with sledge hammers, breaking up the concrete by hand and carting it away.